


Idioglossia

by englishable



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-01
Updated: 2020-03-01
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:13:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22974571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: Ben Solo is not accustomed to hearing or accepting words of unconditional affection, much less believing them.Rey has ways of getting around that, naturally; inventiveness and resourcefulness are in her nature.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 34
Kudos: 235





	Idioglossia

…

She carries the folded piece of flimsiplast tucked into the front of her robes, ticklish and coy and sharp-edged against her skin like a secret, and in each place they visit she takes it out to scribble something else down in blue pencil. Ben is not permitted to examine the note’s contents, despite the frequency with which Rey seems to consult them.

“Uma ji muna,” she tells him, once.

They have both slept the whole night with the blankets drawn up over their heads, against the iron-pincers cold of Hoth that snips at the nose and ears, and the muffling warmth lends Rey’s voice a foolish, furtive glee; Ben squints at her through one bleary eye and ponders what logical reason she could have for knowing a phrase in Huttese, not that his wife sets great store in acting according to the dictates of logic.

“What, now?” he asks. 

She scritches at the beard he has lately begun to cultivate and then leaps from their bed into a cascade of freezing air.

“Meechoo nuv kush,” she tells him, another time, thumbing off a segment from the peeled orange he has bought on Bespin to share with her.

Ben blinks and cocks an ear.

“When was the last time you found it necessary to speak to an Ewok?”

Rey turns the orange segment sideways and wedges it firmly against her teeth to grin at him.

Nanguandente, she hollers, laughing as he banks the Falcon into a precise pitchback turn mid-dive. Rakhasta senuan, she sighs into her hands, her cheeks still flushed from the heat of an argument upon a subject neither one will recall in much detail later. Ni kar’talyi gar daarasuum, she murmurs, her lips gracing the clean-made, clean-healed saber scar on his right side.

Ben bides his time with such watchful concentration that the enigmatic flimsiplast takes on the quality of a sentient, sneaky little adversary in his mind — of whose coveted position between his wife’s breasts Ben also becomes bafflingly jealous, which is entirely besides the point — until one morning he watches Rey drop her robes when she goes into the refresher; her belly has by now grown big enough that stooping to retrieve things is a petty, cumbersome labor and she usually does not bother herself with it. 

A corner of the page protrudes from her emptied sleeve.

He is in the midst of putting on his pants and moves at a demented hop that makes his right leg ache along the mended breaks from his fall on Exegol. He shimmies into the pants and snatches up the paper and unfolds it to read what it says.

He purses his lips.

There are several columns of writing, if Rey’s facetious loops and scratches can be so generously described. Each long, narrow list tilts slightly sideways at its bottom, like the teetering trestles beneath a bridge, but she has made use of both sides right up to their corners. Ben recognizes most but not all of the phrases as things Rey has said to him; there are about seventy languages represented, in total, and all of them are glossed as translating into the exact same thing.

Ben reads each and every one.

…

Rey finds the piece of flimsi just where she has left it, fits it under her robes again, and although there is a funny effervescent shine to her husband’s smile all that day she never quite connects it to the single, blotting drop of water she later notices has fallen and dried amidst the written words. 

I love you, she goes on finding new and different ways to tell him, as the twinned children he has gifted to her go on dancing out their eager impatience within her body. I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you.

…


End file.
